Why you should do WORSE with time in historic fencing (sometimes). Learn by Losing!

The new term is just about to start at Sydney Korean Historic Fencing with a cohort of students who are currently at the best they’ve been, and I am looking forwards to them performing worse in sparring in the coming weeks. It’s an odd thing to say, but them performing worse and losing more passes and bouts is actually by design. There’s a common misconception in technical martial arts that once you start training, you should get better and just keeping winning more in sparring. And I’ve had discussions with other historic fencers who claim they only continually improve, but in practice really only continue to use techniques they are good at and avoid their weaknesses like the plague. However, I think far more learning happens in losing bouts and I try to push my students to throw themselves into patching up the weaknesses of their game, even if that means performing worse in sparring while they are figuring things out.

I think if I wanted my students to win tournaments from the get go, I probably wouldn’t teach them this way. I would analyse their physique and teach them techniques that maximise their natural advantages, telling them to completely ignore techniques that would be lower yield for their stature. Their entire training would be focused on improving these techniques and learning the ways opponents would shut down these techniques, then on how to prevent their opponents from doing so. However, that doesn’t seem that fun to me. I want to teach swordsmanship. I want my students to have a wide breadth of techniques available to them, and to have fun learning and playing with swords. And in sparring I see fencers who have trained a wide range of skills put narrow-trained fencers in fits - because they’ve learned skills to deal with a whole array of techniques and don’t have significant weaknesses that they haven’t worked on.

So what does this have to do with the clickbait title? I think as you train in historic fencing, it’s important to think about where your weaknesses are, and throw yourself into learning by immersion in them. For the student with a great lunge and can cut you from across the room but is terrible at thrusting because they have poor tip control, I would advise them in sparring to play bouts where they are only allowed to thrust. They’ll lose many bouts and be performing worse than they were when they were just cutting. But on the other side of this training, they would hopefully now have a great thrusting game which, combined with their lunge, makes for a very difficult opponent to fence. The other benefit to learning by immersion is that they’ll learn so many other skills such as body positioning, learning to parry to set up into thrusts, distance management just past the tip of their sword, etc., even if initially they find they are struggling more in bouts. Because their best skills are locked away, they will be quickly forced to broaden their game.

I like to think that if you are trying to train to have a wide skillset in swordsmanship, your fencing performance should look something like the rough graph below.

Where each drop corresponds to a new weakness identified and set of handicaps applied to the fencer before allowing them to play with their full skillset to recognize the new peak their skills have come to. And with time, the drops in performance decrease even with the handicaps and end up higher than previous peaks, reflecting that the exploitable weaknesses are growing fewer and fewer and overall improvement is happening.

If we were to change the Y axis of the graph to show the fencer’s actual competence it would likely look something like this:

Continual improvement doesn’t just apply to students as well. Instructors and senior students shouldn’t be these invincible walls that never lose to save face, as is common in many Asian martial arts. Sparring with students should be an opportunity to continually improve weaker techniques of the instructor as well. Rather than fence with the optimum techniques to counter a student’s best game, try to fence with the techniques that you are worst at. Try fencing the student with a great feinting game and ban yourself from doing direct counter attacks. The parry riposte game is extra hard now and it’s a great opportunity to fence at a difficulty level that both you and the student have a fair chance at winning and you’ll have a great learning opportunity for yourself as well. There is nothing worse than the invincible sensei maintaining face with stagnated skills underneath.

I hope this was an interesting read and flips the idea of winning and losing in club bouts on its head. There is no winning or losing. There should only be learning and helping each other get better.